Karim Rashid

Acclaimed Cultural and Industrial Designer, Creativity and Innovation Speaker

Karim Rashid is a top innovation keynote speaker and one of the most prolific designers of his generation. Over 3000 designs in production, over 300 awards and work in over 35 countries attest to Karim’s legend of design. As a renowned international designer, his work is known for being innovative, forward-looking, and strikingly relevant. From furniture to fashion to products for hip brands, Karim Rashid’s colorful projects have burst through the design community and into the mainstream.

  • Karim Rashid Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $10,001 - $20,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    New York, USA

  • Karim Rashid Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $10,001 - $20,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    New York, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

Shaping Future Nutopias

Today, designers approach their work from a different perspective. A poetic design of interiors has evolved based on a plethora of complex criteria — human experience; social, global, economic and political issues; physical and mental ...

Today, designers approach their work from a different perspective. A poetic design of interiors has evolved based on a plethora of complex criteria — human experience; social, global, economic and political issues; physical and mental interaction, form, vision, and a rigorous understanding of contemporary culture. However, manufacturing is based on another collective group of criteria: capital investment, market share, production ease, dissemination, growth, distribution, maintenance and service, performance, quality, ecological issues and sustainability. The combination of all of these components has come to shape our interiors, inform our aesthetic, our physical culture, and our human experiences. These issues shape the business — its identity, its brand, and its value.

Are companies really interested in people and in culture?? Do manufacturers discuss personal rituals, the depths of private relationships, the warmth of family, the codes of love, the signs of human emotions, the regard for happiness, freedom, personal expression, the well being of our human existence? And do they address these questions through the product they sell? Businesses can only be holistic and comprehensive if they are able to address these issues.

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Plastik Blobular Worlds

The world around us seems to be getting perpetually softer, more amorphous and blobular. Our objects are softer, our cars are rounder, our high-tech objects are rounder, and even our bodies are fatter. The digital age, the information society, the ...

The world around us seems to be getting perpetually softer, more amorphous and blobular. Our objects are softer, our cars are rounder, our high-tech objects are rounder, and even our bodies are fatter. The digital age, the information society, the global village and the leisure culture all are symptoms of a changing physical world where ‘Soft’ defines our landscape. This casualization of shape, form, material and behavior is now a movement. This world is data-driven fluidity. Now the landscape will flow.

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Blurring Boundaries

I am a citizen of the global society where there are no boundaries, no borders, no diversities, prejudice, class or racial differences. I love the shrinking unification of the world because it affords all of us to be inspired by every culture, every ...

I am a citizen of the global society where there are no boundaries, no borders, no diversities, prejudice, class or racial differences. I love the shrinking unification of the world because it affords all of us to be inspired by every culture, every person, everywhere and anytime. This is the omnipresent new age in which we live. With more choice, more exposure, more information, more exchange, perpetual communication we become an ever-vast inspiring single world! Globalization has opened up diversity of the individual. As our world shrinks we become more aware of the world around us, we communicate globally, we mix and in turn we will eventually have one global culture made up of individual objective minds.

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About Keynote Speaker Karim Rashid

Karim Rashid’s award-winning designs include the ubiquitous “Garbo” waste can and “Oh Chair” for Umbra, interiors such as the Morimoto restaurant in Philadelphia and Semiramis Hotel in Athens, and exhibitions for Deutsche Bank and Audi. Karim Rashid has collaborated with clients to create democratic design for Method and Dirt Devil, furniture for Artemide and Magis, brand identity for Citibank and Hyundai, high-tech products for LaCie and Samsung, and luxury goods for Veuve Clicquot and Swarovski, to name a few.

Karim Rashid’s work is featured in 20 permanent collections and he exhibits art in galleries worldwide.  Karim is a perennial winner of the Red Dot award, Chicago Athenaeum Good Design award, I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review, and IDSA Industrial Design Excellence award.

Karim Rashid has been featured in numerous periodicals and publications including Time, Financial Times, NY Times, Esquire and GQ. In 2009 Rizzoli released Karim’s latest monograph KarimSpace, featuring 36 of his interior architecture designs. Other books include Karim’s guide to living, Design Your Self, and Digipop, a digital exploration of computer graphics, as well as two monographs entitled Evolution and I Want to Change the World.

Karim Rashid is a frequent guest speaker at universities and conferences, globally disseminating the importance of design in everyday life.

More About Speaker, Karim Rashid . . .
In his spare time Karim Rashid’s pluralism flirts with music (as a DJ), art and fashion and the designer is determined to creatively touch every aspect of our physical landscape.

Karim Rashid holds honorary doctorates from the Ontario College of Art & Design and Corcoran College of Art & Design.

Testimonials

“We were thrilled to be able to have Karim Rashid as our keynote speaker. Karim and his team were professional and amiable from initial contact throughout the entire event. Karim was also tireless in helping us promote his appearance and went above and beyond our expectations. Not only was he the consummate professional but he was equally as engaging in his presentation to an absolute packed house. Everybody loved him and we’d love to see Karim back in Vancouver soon!”

Trish Almeida

Interior Design Show West

“What a force to be reckoned with! The turnout was absolutely phenomenal (approximately 600) and no one left the theatre disappointed – one sure sign of which was the standing ovation Karim received as he left the stage. He was gracious, funny, candid – as consistently informative and he was thoroughly informed. What a class act.”

PUNCH Productions

 

“When Karim Rashid speaks, he charms, he engages, and he informs. He does it all in an effortless manner—as if he were speaking to a group of his closest friends. He is everything a spokesman should be. Most of all, he’s a tough act to follow!”

Edie Cohen

Deputy Editor, Interior Design Magazine

Karim Rashid’s presentation was reported to be ‘the most crowded’ of the 2010 Istanbul Design Week conference.  The conference room (which was for 350 people) was not large enough, so his speech was broadcast to an outside screen at the Old Galata Bridge.  All iDW attendees were very happy to see his unique presentation.

Sinem Kocayas

iDW

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